Re: Class and case

From: "Clint Jackson Baker" <litrex1@...>

| Simply put, what is the difference between noun class
| and noun case?

In terms of Indo-European and Semitic, noun class is gender. Inanimate objects
that have no natural sex may be of various genders, seemingly arbitrarily
assigned (but I kinda have a theory about that). I'll use Russian as an example:

gorod "city" = masculine because of consonant ending (plural: gorody)
strana "country" = feminine because of -a suffix (plural: strany)
mesto "thing" = neuter because of -o suffix (plural: mesta)

As Christophe mentioned, Bantu languages like Swahili have many noun cases, but
not based on gender; they're based on shape, size and other qualities and are
marked by prefixes.

Noun CASE on the other hand defines semantic role as well as locations and
movements. Again in Russian:

Nominative: gorod "the city" (plural gorody)
Accusative: gorod (same as Nominative because it's inanimate; if animate it's
same as Genitive)
Genitive: gorody "of the city" (plural gorodov)
Dative: gorodu "to the city" (plural gorodam)
Instrumental: gorodom "with/by way of the city" (plural gorodami)
Prepositional: na gorode "in the city" (plural gorodakh)

Note that the concept of case is a little different in agglutinating languages
like Finnish, Hungarian or Turkish, where there are more cases, but there is a
very regular, predictable system of suffixation (and Turkish incorporates the
plural marker -lar-/-ler- before the case endings which are the same for both
numbers). Sanskrit, Latin and Lithuanian, three outstanding cases in
Indo-European, have a limited number of inflectional cases (and use prepositions
for others): eight, six and seven respectively. But masculine singulars have one
set of case endings, feminines another, neuters yet another, the plurals get
their own set, and then you have the lesser declensions, often based on the end
vowel of the noun stem and not the gender of the noun (Latin has -is, -us
and -es nouns, for example). I haven't even mentioned irregularities and
semi-irregularities (like Latin nouns ending in -x).

One last comment: adjectives and pronouns too have gender and case in IE and
Semitic languages with rules of agreement with the noun antecedent.

~Danny~

P.S.: I mentioned before that non-animate entities have masculine, feminine and
neuter genders based on philosophical notions, though these are hard to pin down
exactly. One of my theories for Exian is that masculines tend to refer to
initiation and incompleteness, feminines to the final product and perfection,
and neuters to particular by-products. Please don't ask what I mean by this
because I don't know either. ;)

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